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I received my MA in philosophy of science many years ago and currently reviving my academic interests. I hope to stimulate individuals in the realms of science, philosophy and the arts...to provide as much free information as possible.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Indiana Jones Journal mystery solved

"Mystery of the Indiana Jones Journal Solved: It Came From the Internet. And Guam"

by

Angela Watercutter

December 17th, 2012

Wired

Like all good things, the mysterious journal addressed to Indiana Jones that arrived at the University of Chicago last week came from the internet – eBay to be exact. And how it found its way to the university is a tale that ought to be told with a cinema map and an animated moving read line.

The university had received a package (above) that was addressed to “Henry Walton Jones, Jr.” Inside was a near-exact replica of the journal of Abner Ravenwood, which Indy uses in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perplexed about its origins, the school posted on Tumblr and set up an e-mail tip line to try to find out if anyone could offer clues as to where the book came from. They also contacted Lucasfilm and an eBay user who had been selling similar replicas online. On Monday morning the university told Wired that they received an e-mail from the eBay seller, Paul Charfauros, informing them that he had gotten a letter from the U.S. Postal Service to say that one of his replicas — intended for a buyer in Italy — had been lost in the mail.

“Somewhere between Guam and Italy the replica fell out of its original external package and was lost in Honolulu, Hawaii,” Garrett Brinker, director of undergraduate outreach for the University of Chicago, told Wired. “Then for some reason, with fake postage, no tracking, not even a zip code — it looks like the Postal Service had to manually write in a zip code on the package — somehow without all of that the package landed in our laps in Chicago, Illinois.”

As the university elaborated on their Tumblr:

We believe that the post office wrote on our Zip code on the outside of the package and, believing the Egyptian postage was real, sent it our way. From Guam to Hawaii en route to Italy with a stopover in Chicago: truly an adventure befitting Indiana Jones.

After the university discovered the mystery journal last week, dozens of tips and theories poured in about where it could have come from — some thought it was part of an ARG, others thought it was a promotional stunt by Lucasfilm, and still others thought it might have been a piece of creative “art abandonment.” But Brinker himself hoped that it was the work of an enterprising prospective student who wanted to send a very creative admissions essay. Some had thought that it might be a lost delivery from an eBay replica-maker, but others hoped for an even more elaborate tale behind the journal’s origin. Even Brinker.

“We anticipated this in some sense, and as I mentioned before, it’s one of the least romantic theories,” Brinker said, adding that he’s still delighted about how the mystery has unraveled. “Now we even have multiple departments on campus that want this journal and want to store this journal, including special collections in one of our libraries…. So it’s turned out to be quite a fascinating story.”The eBay seller has offered to let the university keep the replica and in return the school will be sending him some University of Chicago garb as a sign of gratitude for the magic package, which, of course, belongs in a museum.

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Poet colleague

Annus mirabilis-1905 March is a time of transition winter and spring commence their struggle between moments of ice and mud a robin appears heralding the inevitable life stumbling from its slumber it was in such a period of change in 1905 that the House of Physics would see its Newtonian axioms of an ordered universe collapse into a new frontier where the divisions of time and space matter and energy were to blend as rain and wind in a storm that broke loose within the mind of Albert Einstein where Brownian motion danced seen and unseen, a random walk that became his papers marching through science reshaping the very fabric of the universe we have come to know we all share a common ancestor a star long lost in the eons of memory and yet in that commonality nature demands a permutation a perchance genetic roll of the dice which births a new vision lifting us temporarily from the mystery exposing some of the roots to our existence only to raise a plethora of more questions as did the papers of Einstein in 1905